Scion: Ties That Bind

Alan's Guide for Building an Effective Scion Character

So in the course of play, our group has had some trouble making Scion character’s they felt were effective. I’ll be using this page to create notes, ideas, and suggestions for future characters and others.

We’ll start with combat as that seems to be the biggest problem.

Combat

A lot of parties have trouble with combat and this is due to a few reasons.

#1. Lack of consistency in combat builds between characters. Wildly varying stats and abilities (which Scion encourages), lead to encounters being hard on groups, as some characters deal easily with situations, and others do not.

#2. Storytellers not understanding how powerful some aspects of the game really are. Hand to hand combat, is BRUTALLY powerful in Scion, especially with the right relics.

We’ll start with those to. So dealing with number one:

Something that can be done, is encouraging the use of Knacks such as Damage Conversion for all characters, Body Armor for those characters who don’t want to wear armor, or Skin Shedding to prevent that one big hit. High DV low soak characters are great, and are a solid and viable combat build, but one good hit will kill them outright. I encourage all players to take at least 1-2 dots of epic soak in Hero, and to take at least Body Armor (if they plan on wearing no sort of armor at all), and Damage Conversion. Body Armor increases your soak, and Damage Conversion will really keep you in the game longer.

Self-Healing is a deceptive Knack. It seems good, and really useful, but in the long run, the cost of a Legend per point of health is a very hard price to pay for a lot of players, as that will use their legend for health exclusively, and nothing else. It’s a rough trade, but a trade that can keep a Character alive a hit longer then he normally would be. Don’t discount out Self-Healing, especially at Demigod and forward.

Character who build themselves exclusively for combat (and especially Greek/Irish Scions) will outshine anyone else who has a half-hearted build. This leads to enemies doing damage that barely hurts the combat characters, but will crush the others. A difficult issue yes? I would recommend the following: Have the “tank” use Center of Attention at the start of a fight. As worded it won’t last, but logically speaking, it would draw the attention of all the enemies to him for at least one round.